Today, data is almost entirely processed electronically by means of large computer systems. Particularly in the field of operating a business, a large amount of data covering all aspects of a business, particularly in the context with customers, orders, billing, machine or device data etc., accumulate over time. In order not to overload the database of the computer system, there is usually the wish to delete data that is not needed anymore, e.g. data concerning a finished business activity or process. However, very often there exists a legal requirement to keep such data over a given time period, which can be five years and even longer. As a solution hereto, software developers created so-called archive systems in which all kind of data and data documents can be archived once they are not needed in the database anymore. However, there is the drawback that archived data cannot be changed or altered anymore as the archive system usually is a read-only medium. Therefore, users tend to keep even data which could be archived in the regular productive database because they want to be able to perform certain changes as there are cases in which it is desirable to alter archived data. This leads to a situation in which data archiving is not performed as soon as it should (or could) be done, in order to ensure system performance and to keep the database size at a reasonable and preferably constant level.
The only possibility to change archived data today is to reload such data into the database, perform necessary changes and archiving the data again after it has been changed. This results in a very high administrative and time wise effort and is a potential source of error.